Yoko Tawada's Novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Between “East” and “West”: Goethe’s World Literature, the Question of Nation, and the Postnational in Yoko Tawada’s Novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear Monika Leipelt-Tsai* ABSTRACT Goethe had established a literary connection between “Europe” and the “Orient” in his West-Östlicher Divan (West-East Divan). His idea of “world literature” can be reframed when it is linked by Homi K. Bhabha with the cosmopolitan: “the study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness.’” The contemporary author Yoko Tawada is from East Asia and has been writing poems, prose, and plays in German and in Japanese. In her playful way of writing, she explores the interrela- tionship between “Western” and “Eastern” cultures, thereby translating them in cross-border poetics. Using the method of constellation, we examine the question of nation and the postnational in Goethe and Tawada alongside Bhabha, and propose to read Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear as “world literature” in light of how the transnational migrants’ perspective becomes literally difficult to place. KEYWORDS world literature, Goethe, West-Eastern Divan, Yoko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, the national Ex-position, Issue No. 45, June 2021 | National Taiwan University DOI: 10.6153/EXP.202106_(45).0009 Monika LEIPELT-TSAI, Associate Professor, Department of European Languages and Cultures, National Chengchi University, Taiwan 141 Goethe’s World Literature Yoko Tawada, born in 1960 in Tokyo, is a postnational writer who lives in Berlin, Germany and travels the world. She is already famous, and, among other prizes, in 2017 she received the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for Memoirs of Ex-position a Polar Bear, together with the translator Susan Bernofsky. The adjective “post- June 2021 national,” according to the English Oxford Living Dictionaries, indicates “relating to a time or society in which national identity has become less important. Origin 1940” (“Postnational”). While the denotation of the adjective “postnational” itself seems to undermine any relation to an origin, the definition from the dictionary ironically indicates that it may be difficult to think of the adjective without thinking about any connection to a historical time (hence “Origin 1940”). At first, Yoko Tawada’s enigmatic novels and stories in German and Japanese do seem rather exclusive. Still, many of her texts can be read as something universal, the paradigmatic human condition in the contemporary globalized and transnational world. In literary criticism, the term “world literature”—a translation1 from the German word Weltliteratur—is usually read as a keyword for intermediation between nations and often appertains to a gesture of codification. At the same time, the term “world literature” is an opaque one. One important notion of the term “world literature” goes back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his 1827 “Allgemeine Betrachtungen zur Weltliteratur” (“General Considerations on World Literature”) (Apel et al. 14, 914). To him, “world literature” was not just a collective term for all the discoverable literatures in the world. For Goethe, the translation of foreign poetry was one of the key means to connect individual national literatures. In this regard, Tawada’s poetic writing can be considered “world literature” because not only does she write in her mother tongue Japanese, but she has translated some of her works herself, which started a process of interaction between different peoples. Her choice as a non-German native to write as well in the German language “clearly is a break with the tradition of canonical German and western literature” (Benoun 133). Also, by means of translation she defamiliarizes the distinction between the self and the foreign and undermines a given constitution of cultures (Mae 35). As will be seen, we can also argue, with Goethe, that besides 1 In every attempt of a translation of literary texts there is not only something gained but always something lost, even in “world literature.” With Walter Benjamin one can say that it is impossible to reveal the hidden inner relationship of languages through translation, and that translation cannot possibly reproduce that relation; however, translation can at least display it by germinally or intensively implementing it (Benjamin). 142 international distribution as “world literature,” the artistic value of Tawada’s work has to be widely recognized since she received, among others, the Akutagawa Prize in 1993 and the Kleist Prize in 2016. Following a poly-methodological openness, we will first introduce different terms and try to eludicate the difficult issue of nationality in Goethe with a short exemplary close reading of his West-East Divan (cited as Divan hereafter), followed Between by an inquiry into the question ofculture and world literature. Through a reading “East” and “West” of Tawada’s 2011 novel Yuki no renshusei, translated by herself into German in 2014 as Etüden im Schnee (Etudes in the Snow) and published in 2016 in English under the title Memoirs of a Polar Bear, we will analyze the inherent minoritarian condition of the “interstitial” third space, borrowing Bhabha’s words (326). We open up the following questions: What kind of rhetorical, linguistic, and stylistic means are used to describe the idiosyncratic perception of Tawada’s protagonists? In which manner is social and cultural displacement addressed? How are the topic of otherness and the split position of the transnational minoritarian condition projected? In this way, we will show how the oscillating transnational background of Tawada’s protagonists makes the contrast between different cultures productive. The Question of Nation and Unhomeliness Identity formation is usually constituted not only by class and gender identity, but also by geographical and cultural notions of identity construction, e.g., the personal relation to a city or to a homeland as a national identity. A precedent division of the denotation of the term “nation” can be observed when we examine its Latin roots, thereby opening up its semantic splitting. The word “nation” stems etymologically from the Latin noun nātiō, meaning “birth” (Stowasser 293). Secondly, the term metonymically signifies “nation/clan” (as group of a people) and “tribe”; and thirdly, it implies metaphorically the notions of “species,” “genre,” “class,” and “kin.” The emphasis on birth is important since the nationality of a human being is bestowed by birth in relation to its location (jus soli), and by birth the nationality is also tied to the parents’ nationality (“Jus sanguinis”) and their people. Yet, the adjective “ethnic” also indicates “of or relating to races or large groups of people who have the same customs, religion, origin” (“Ethnic”) and can be “associated with . a particular race or group of people who have a culture that is different from the main culture of a country” (“Jus sanguinis”). The term “ethnicity” stems from the Greek noun éthnos, which suggests, among others, a folk, or a group of people or a group of animals (Liddell 226). What it does not address, however, is that the problematic attribution to the social 143 structure category “ethnicity” is traditionally also connected with visible, pictorial, demarcating signs that have to be interpreted. Accordingly, these are construed, for instance, with elements that (just) appear culturally determinable (such as clothing, skin color, hair structure, forms of facial parts) and are interpreted as a sign of belonging to a nation or a tribe. Ex-position It becomes clear that the term “nation” is difficult to grasp since it overlaps June 2021 partly with the concept of “ethnicity.” However, we can say that, unlike the notion of “ethnicity” which also stands for a “quality or affiliation” (“Ethnicity”)—for instance, a cultural, religious, or linguistic background—the term “nationality” bears reference to a geographical place of birth. Furthermore, since in modern English the term “nation” implies the notions of nationality, tribe, and people as well, the term today also designates a human being in terms of its legal relationship to a political entity such as a sovereign state. While the narrative of a common national identity is needed to build a state, the construction of an ethnic identity seems less bound to a geographical area. Goethe was born in 1749 in Frankfurt in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (962-1806) that was multi-ethnic and had a “multi-lingual structure, a decentralized and multi-confessional form” (“Holy Roman Empire”). Remarkably, in Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) he narrated his own birth, implying that as a stillborn child he later came to life (Flüh). In the regions of today’s Germany the process of nation-building was much belated since scat- tered regionalism prevailed due to the proliferation of many small states. After the defeat of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, Prussian statesman Baron vom Stein stated the lack of an all-German national consciousness (Burgdorf 28). Between 1815 and 1866, the Germans had merely a confederation that united them more or less, so the German notion of “nation” is less concentrated on thinking about democracy. The issue of “nation” in Goethe seems problematic, and at times he used the German term Volk instead of Nation (Kimura 468), which describes simple folk, ethnic people, and a nation (with less political asso- ciations). According to Naoji Kimura, the issue of “nation” in Goethe could be problematized under four aspects: Goethe’s contact with France in times of Storm-and-Stress, the “Nationaltheater” (national theater) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), Goethe’s thinking of morphology, and his concept of “world literature” (Kimura 466). Analyzing Goethe’s notion of “nationality,” we will concentrate on the latter and on his poem collection Divan. In his Divan, Goethe mingled his voice with that of fourteenth-century poet Hafiz, bringing the literature of the German and the Persian cultures together.

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